Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams

by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Fletcher's first memoir recalls his childhood in New Mexico explores the feelings and echoes that surround events, objects, and people.

272 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Susanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I savored this book slowly, so it took deceptively long. Fletcher is such a master of the collage essay form. This book exquisitely captures several ideas and essences: the sense of revisiting a place held mostly in childhood memories, but with new eyes; and as sub-topics of that overarching theme, watching one's parents age and diminish physically, alongside a history that is vanishing into the rearview mirror of life. Yet along with the forthright and the wistful, there's the sense of what revisiting the past does for the current person. Hard to put into words, but easy to feel when reading this work. Especially, a beautiful way of capturing Albuquerque, New Mexico, and its people.

[Sophfronia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do believe, I say. Always have. The stories are beautiful. From them I draw a sense of who I am. The people and places she describes are alive inside me, fully formed, as if I've always known them. When she speaks, she awakens a dream. I'm just trying to align what I feel with what I see.
"What happened was a miracle," she says, removing her hand. "You don't understand."

But author Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, conversing here with his mother in an excerpt from Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, does understand or at least is trying his hardest to do so. The results of his labors can be founds in two books, this one and Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life. I'm posting this same review for Descanso because the two books are best read together if possible. They are both a part of the same story comprising the ancestral roots of the author's family.

The books are not written, though, as stale and formal historical records. Fletcher is dealing with scraps of memories and long told tales. In the case of his father, Fletcher had precious little to work with because his father died while the author was still a toddler and that side of family, apart from Fletcher and his siblings, ended there. But he does have desire to guide him, the yearning to know a man so close to his heart if not his memory. And Descanso as well as Presentimiento take on the dreamlike quality of a walk through the fog of emotion and history as Fletcher offers his words with the reverence of sacred text, not unlike the artifacts he and his mother collect in their travels through New Mexico as she shares once more, at times with painful reluctance, the story of her family, the Candelarias.

Fletcher is seeking reality, not dreams, and within the reality of his ancestors he hopes to understand his own identity. His endeavor sparks compassion and empathy. It feels as though we are combing the New Mexican desert dust with him, searching for our own bloodstones of remembrance, of meaning. I recommend both books and I recommend you sit with them a good while and let the author's spell overtake you. These books are miracles, and worth understanding.